Bringing a product to market: Wype
When we discovered Wype, a hygiene start-up looking to keep the UK’s butts clean and our planet even cleaner, we instantly clicked with their ethos, their desire to do good in the world and, most importantly, their cheeky sense of humour!
Giorgia and Eli
How Wype was started
Created by founders Giorgia and Eli, who describe themselves as an inquisitive Italian and a globetrotting Kiwi, Wype came from Giorgia’s shock when she couldn’t find any bidets in the UK! She thought wet wipes were the answer, but when she found out they were full of plastic and doing more damage than good she decided she needed to make a new solution. An alternative to wet wipes, something that provided the clean feeling of a bidet whilst being gentle to the body and good for the planet. So Wype was born. An eco-friendly alternative to toilet wipes giving you a bidet-clean feeling on the go. A natural gel which makes your toilet paper work harder for you.
Kicking off with a consultation session
After a real-life, face-to-face meeting (remember those?!) with Giorgia, we kick-started our work with Wype with our ‘nitty gritty’ start-up consultation session. Giorgia and Eli downloaded their thoughts, hopes and aims to us through our online questionnaire and shared with us some of their visual visions for the brand.
We took this and created a full marketing plan for them. We started by getting to know their target audience in more detail, delving into who they are, where they live, their values and the brands they associate with. From this, we created two audience personas to bring their audience to life. This is one of the most important exercises we do in our consultation sessions - knowing your audience and being able to put yourselves in their shoes is key.
We then created a top-line tone of voice guide to help shape and direct any copy written for Wype from the website to the labels on the bottle to social media. We also brainstormed some taglines during the session and worked on some copy rewrites together to make sure the tone was working for the brand.
In this session we also set them a social media strategy, advised which social media channels they should be using and put together some guides on how best to use them. We created recommended content pillars to add depth and interest to their website including some blog post recommendations and finished with the fun part - some creative and juicy campaign ideas.
“The session was very useful and helpful, and now we have the freedom to take our time and think each piece through before we proceed in any direction – perfect for entrepreneurs and small businesses.”
Bringing their vision to life
Following our session together Wype briefed us to bring their brand identity to life, taking the logo and assets they’d already created, refining them and expanding upon them to create branding that could be used across all marketing and sales channels.
We worked together to create the design brief and a Pinterest board to help us all visualise the look and feel we were after. We then went out to our collective to brief in our graphic designers for an initial pitch mood board.
From here we all agreed that the work of Benjamin Brown from Citizen Design was the winner! We worked with Ben to create Wype’s brand guidelines including colour palette, fonts, logos, icons and brand patterns.
We managed the whole process for Wype, working closely with Ben to develop the branding and make sure it delivered what Wype were after, but also pooled our branding knowledge and expertise to make sure it would stand-out and have longevity.
A lot of work goes into one little bottle
The next challenge for all of us was to take the branding we’d created and make it work on the bottle which would be small, mighty and infinitely recyclable.
We encountered a few hiccups along the way, but Wype had allowed a good buffer of time so a switch from printing directly onto the aluminium bottle to moving to a label didn’t delay the end goal. It was well worth it and the end result ticks all of our boxes!
As well as the design by Ben Brown, we also pulled in the help of another Doer, word wizard Ben Hayes. We were almost there with label copy but felt like it needed a bit of refinement and a fresh pair of eyes. Bring in Ben who helped us simplify the label copy and product instructions and after a few goes and bouncing around some ideas we landed on Wype’s strapline ‘Clean Up Down There’. Simple, effective and perfectly aligned with the brand's cheeky outlook on life.
Wype right
To recap, so far we've worked closely with Giorgia and Eli from Wype and the two Ben’s to map out a marketing strategy, create brand guidelines, labelling and copy. Our next step was to build Wype’s website for them.
Using Squarespace and a brief given to us by Giorgia, we mapped out a website that would deliver brand messaging, brand and founders story, product details, a blog and most importantly a shopping function to buy directly through the website.
We created a tight brief for the additional website assets for Ben to create for us, worked up the copy and built the site for them from scratch.
The results - a consumer-facing website which tells the story of Wype, looks fun, eye-catching and lets consumers easily navigate the who, what, where and why before making a purchase.
And we’re live
The website is now live, social media is active and most importantly the sales are rolling in and people across the UK are now experiencing Wype and ‘cleaning up down there’. A job well done!
“The Doers have been a huge support to us while setting up our branding and website, while taking away all the hassle of managing and coordinating different collaborators. The Doers go above and beyond and don’t only execute requests, but are proactive in suggesting additional solutions. It was a very personalised experience and it felt like they were part of our team!”
